If it takes me a couple of hours to set up an IRC server and 20 minutes of maintenance per month to keep it running, $10/month is a STEAL.
Not to mention... at anything less than $10/month you need one heck of a lot of paying customers for a service like this to cover its costs.
Sliding scale pricing based on # of users for IRC is not the way to do it.
I very much get the "pay someone else to worry about it" thing, but private IRC servers are so insanely simple, low-cost, and low-maintenance that grove's position seems abnormally tenuous.
Edit: There's something else very odd about their pricing. On their lowest plan, the nominal per-user cost is $2. On all the other plans, with the exact same features, just more users, it's $2.50. A price structure that directly incentivizes not upgrading, however slightly, is very backwards.
The first two words anyone is going to read on grove.io: "Hosted IRC".
Right about there, 80% of people are going to ask "What's IRC?". It's never explained.
"and so much more." Like what?
"plus additional features"... uh...?
"Why Grove is better". Better than what?
Oh look, a feature. Almost, if not completely on some screens, below the fold. "Archives and search"... of what?
Finally, "chat logs". Oh, it's something to do with chat. Well, I already have that!
If anyone even bothers to look at pricing, they're going to wonder why they want to pay somebody for all this.
Meanwhile, at least half the people who already know what IRC is are unimpressed. "IRC? Who uses that anymore? We have IM now. It's free. I even have logs.". Oops. Same problem.
Edit: Meanwhile, an experienced IRC user like me: I run irssi in screen on a reliable server. All my channels and private messages are logged, and I know how to use grep. What's grove for again?
It is very easy to get any of these running and if you read the docs (or the comments in the config files) there aren't many gotchas either. I wouldn't say they're zero maintenance, but they are fairly low - the majority of the maintenance you'd still have with a hosted server, as it's getting things working exactly how you like, and dealing with troublesome users!
One other point that springs to mind: if people want a free alternative to running their own server or using grove, there are lots of good IRC networks to choose from that will host your channel for free.
That's where our nerdy brains go when confronted with pricing plans, but I'm not sure that the person actually buying this would see it the same way. Imagine that you're a business and you're paying for tools so your employees can actually get work done and make money. Do you really think that when you hire employee #6 (probably for an all-in cost of six figures), you're going to be scrutinizing the bump from $10 / month to $25 / month and trying to figure out what your per-employee cost is? Umm...no. You're going to hit upgrade and move onto something more productive. Or you're not going to be employing anyone for long.
I think they need to revamp their marketing speak and triple their pricing.
Atlassian is a great example of an extreme version of this. The cost for me to have 10 users (on-premise, but hosted is similar) is $10 ($1 per user). The cost to have 11 is $800 ($75 per user).
It's a smart, if unintuitive pricing model - you can demonstrate the value of your product to cash-strapped startups that are going to be extremely cost-conscious, and start charging more on value once the company has started to see success.
"Hosted email. Just $10/month for 100 incoming emails."
As you say, you can just buy a VPS for less than $10/mo and install an irc server on it.
you could say the same thing about heroku in many ways and yet they have done very well.
It's just irc too, but 30/month is not even a rounding error, and hipchat brought a cohesion to my team that is unbelievable. It made a huge difference, and I didn't have to configure or script anything.
Click, pay, and my world was rocked.
Forget about IRC - not configured here syndrome is almost as bad as not built here. I'd rather be working on my mission than setting up servers.
$10/month for 5 users on IRC?
This service is very poorly branded. IRC is a protocol that is easy to set up, free, and low maintenance. Whatever value there is to outsourcing IRC server setup, it isn't $10/mo. But that isn't even what their main service is. Their platform is just built on IRC--their other features (Archiving, workflow integration, etc) are much much much more value-adding. Its like advertising heroku as "rails hosting, and more!". It doesn't point to the real value of the service.
I can get easy IRC hosting for much cheaper than $10/month. Don't charge someone $10/month for an IRC server. Charge them $10/month for a developer-oriented integrated messaging platform or something.